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Do other countries need to have spelling bees? Specifically, non-English-speaking countries.

I took Spanish in high school, and I have some experience with German. It seems that other languages have much more consistent spelling and pronunciation rules for their languages.

What would be the point of a spelling bee in a sensible language? If you can pronounce the word, you can spell it. Unlike English, where one pronunciation can have 3 different spellings, or one spelling can have 3 different pronunciations, and not much is consistent.

Even better is a language like Chinese, which has characters for each word (generally). I imagine a Chinese spelling bee to be something like this:

Judge: Spell ‘boat’
Kid: Symbol for ‘boat’
Judge: Very good.

A few years back, I wrote about phrases that are wrong. I now have one more to add to the list:

I lied.

At its face value, there is nothing wrong with that statement. I mean, the action it is describing is morally wrong, but the statement is fine.

But people, more and more I’ve noticed, don’t say it when they’ve lied.

They say it when they are merely wrong.

Lying requires an intention to deceive. You think something is A, but you say it is B. If you think something is A and you say it is A, you are not lying. If it really is B, you were just wrong. Please don’t call it lying. That dilutes the wrongness of lying and promotes (or demotes?) it to being a mistake.

At first, people just coughed into the air.

Then someone realized that was spreading disease to people in the area, so it became polite to cough into one’s hand.

Then someone realized that was spreading disease to people who touched things that hand touched, so it was taught to children to cough into their elbows.

Now I’ve realized that’s fine for children but bad for adults. So now when this generation of kids grows up and instinctively coughs into the elbows, it’ll still cause problems.

Why it’s a problem is that adults use their elbows more than kids. Have you ever seen an adult go very long without crossing his arms? And where are that adult’s hands when his arms are crossed? Fully in contact with his elbow, that’s where.

Picture it – someone sneezes or coughs into his own elbow. Then, just seconds later – before any germs have a chance to die – that someone puts his hand right into the thick of the most germ-intense place around. Are we as a society saying that’s an improvement?

Okay, maybe it is a little better, but it doesn’t quite solve the problem. There are two ways to solve the problem. One is to train people not to cross their arms. The other is to pick a better spot into which one may cough or sneeze.

I’d like to go with the second option. Some possibilities: the inside of one’s shirt (as my brother is wont to do – just pull your collar up and lean your head down slightly and all the germs are contained. This is not a possibility if you are wearing a necktie.), higher up on one’s arm (gives the germs a landing place but doesn’t contain them well), or a handkerchief (that no one carries anymore, but I suppose a hat would work).

Any better ideas?

I was shopping around for a new curtain rod for the shower and I noticed that they were all titled “tension rod”.

They were titled that because they are held in place by pressing against the walls, rather than by being fastened to the walls.

But from what I learned in college, that’s wrong.

The curtain rod is pushing against the walls so it is being compressed. It should be a compression rod.

A tension rod would be somewhere that needed to prevent two walls from spreading apart.

Maybe a better way to do this is to picture a spring in the middle of the bar. To get the curtain rod to stay in place, you wedge it in place – what happens to the spring compared to its normal state? It is compressed. When a tension rod is in use, it is experiencing compression.

Whoever named that thing a tension rod has some explaining to do.

No object other than havoc is ever used with the verb wreak, and vice-versa it seems.

Why not get rid of the apparently redundant word wreak and just say “havocking”?

That should make sense.

Because what else do people wreak other than havoc? Does anyone wreak peace? Wreaking order?

Although havocking for some reason does sound friendlier than wreaking havoc.

Bonus grammar/etymology question: shouldn’t someone have to furl something first before it is unfurled? Yet I never hear of anything being furled.

I was near someone who was listening to headphones. Not earbuds, but full headphones. And I could hear his music fairly well, even though I didn’t want to.

And that got me thinking.

Why don’t they make noise-canceling headphones which the mechanism turned around? In other words, instead of cancelling the outside noises for the headphone wearer, have the headphones cancel the noise they’re making to the outside world.

You may be trying to answer that question literally, and your answer is probably “because no consumer would pay for that feature”. If someone could find a way to market and sell that, the world would be a better place.

When someone who is familiar with the English language hears “Lapis Lazuli”, this is what he pictures:

But I imagine that someone who is more familiar with the Spanish language would picture “Lapis Lazuli” as this: